"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and other personal passions with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone. Never had ads, never will.

June 11, 2009

Today's Lakeville Journal article, readable at the link with free registration, was all about bioluminescence. Or faeries and witch lights, take your pick. I managed to work a bit of Coleridge and Rachael Carson in there, too, and the inspiration, as it always is at this time of year, was the first night o fthe fireflies:

"...Last night at dusk, out where grasses sway in the meadow beyond the garden gate and a wild apple reaches its gnarled limbs to touch the western stars, they all took wing and began their meandering flight. From under leaf and blade, first one, then swarms of winking lights called and responded among the grasses: “Here I am, come dance with me!” Enthralled, my children and I stood by the garden gate and watched the wisp lights in the vapors swirl and eddy from tassels to treetops..."

Two weeks ago, my piece in the journal was about those spring glories of the swamp: yellow ladyslippers and marsh marigolds. The season for both has passed, now, but you can read about them here.

June 09, 2009

Snapping turtles smell like the swamp. I stopped for one crossing the highway in the rain this morning on a fast stretch of road that slices through the largest inland wetland in Connecticut. This is the season when gravid females haul out from the ooze and journey overland looking for suitable high ground to lay their eggs. Often the gravel of a road embankment has the characteristics they seek, which exposes them to the twin perils of traffic on paved roads and graders on gravel ones.

This is a vulnerable time for these otherwise fearsome turtles. Their nests are prone to racoon raiders and hungry skunks, both of which have seen their populations spike thanks to the forgaging opportunities presented by human habitation and its associated garbage. Road crossings can be perilous for snappers, though in this respect they fare better than smaller wetland creatures like migrating amphibeans that are flattened in their thousands on warm spring nights. I found a shattered spotted turtle just a bit further along this stretch of roadway last week, and stopped to see whether it was indeed this declining species or the federally threatened bog turtle it resembles.

So I brake for turtles, even snappers. This one did not appreciate my efforts when I hefted her by the tail and carried her across to the other side of the road. She hissed from deep within the underbelly white of her formidable mouth, and right away I caught the thick, foetid odor that clings to these turtles as if they were part of the reeking mire itself. This is nothing, however, compared to the stench of the common musk or "stinkpot" turtle", an unassuming little creature that seems to me to have been steeped in effluvia and then glazed with clotted slime. Had she been one of these, I might have looked for something other than my bare hand to move her with. As it was, the snapper was quickly on her way and I on mine, and neither of us the worse for wear.

May 12, 2009

I watched a herring gull live up to its name as Emily and I were leaving Windrock last weekend. My annual pilgrimage to the Agawam River Herring Run is a favorite springtime ritual. I start checking in late March, when the very first Osprey come winging northward, and the river herring out in the cold Atlantic sense something warmer in the meltwater that calls them home. By late April the blueback herring and alewife should be in the river and making their way to the flume. Here they collect beneath the plunging water and negotiate the fish ladder up and under the highway and into a chain of ponds by Myles Standish State forest where the lucky ones will spawn.

The herring fishery is closed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and several other states as far away as North Carolina because stocks are so depleted. I can remember times when the Agawan was crammed with fish from bank to bank, and any Town resident could get a bucket for fish for fertilizer or lobster bait. Even so, there is usually still at least one other car at the herring run when we arrive: another Pilgrim like me who is there just to check on the fish. There are a number of herring gulls there, too, a species much maligned for its attraction to garbage. On this ocassion, however, Emily and I saw one catch a herring.

The bird stood on a stone in the rushing water, poised above the dark river and the fish striving in the current. Suddenly it struck and came up with a foot long fish. It flew to the bank and choked down the herring in a few great gulps while other gulls closed in to try and snatch away the prize should the bird falter. It was a great mouthful that stuck for a short time in its gorge as it worked to swallow its prize. I have seen herring gulls with corncobs wedged in their gullets, but this bird managed to complete its task in short order and demonstrated that it still derserved the name.

Emily felt badly for the fish, yet here before us was the great cycle of life and death played out in one of the great migration dramas of this or any other place. It is the same with salmon and grizz, lion and wildebeast. We saw the power of the school to overwhelm the predators even as it loses individuals, and felt something of the compulsion of instinct that draws the fish to the river in our desire to be there to watch it happen.

Herring in the river is a reassuring sight. It gives me faith that at least for another year, a part of the natural heritage of New England will still abide. I never knew the East's great rivers with their full compliment of sturgeon and salmon, but herring face their greatest struggle in our time. Long may they run.

April 06, 2009

My latest article in the Lakeville Journal appeared in the April 2nd edition; readable here with free on-line registration:

"...My friend Mark Brown, an avid angler, tells me that we really have no native brookies left in Connecticut, as the indigenous strain has been thoroughly diluted by stocked fish. Not only that, but the widespread clearing of the landscape in the 19th century, accompanied by heavy fishing and the introduction of non-native trout species, further impacted genetic diversity of brook trout thought most of its range. On opening day in 1877, one fisherman in Salisbury reportedly caught 150 brook trout in Moore Brook: none of them larger than half a pound.

By the early 20th century, a conservation movement spearheaded by dedicated sportsmen was hard at work in an effort to restore some of America’s vanishing wildlife — including the now ubiquitous white tailed deer — and to introduce other game species that they hoped would naturalize. Theodore Roosevelt is the one who is best remembered, but another national conservation leader was Connecticut’s Sen. Frederick C. Walcott, who along with Starling W. Childs established the Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk and Falls Village.

Sen. Walcott was a close friend and ally of Herbert Hoover, who deserves to be remembered as one of our great fishing presidents as well as the fellow who saw the bottom drop out of the market on his watch. In May 1940, the two men went angling at George Quinion’s fishing camp on Schenob Brook, just across the state line in Massachusetts, where they released several trout to help establish the fishery. Quinion noted approvingly that President Hoover was careful to handle the fish with wet hands to preserve their protective coating, and used a barbless hook for his flies... "

The paper also ran one of my salamander pictures, which doubles the exhorbitant rate my services now command from a Hamilton to a Jackson.

March 30, 2009

"Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said `Bother!' and `O blow!' and also `Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, `Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow."

- Kenneth Grahame "Wind in the Willows"

There was a chorus of spring peepers singing praise songs in the twilight when I stepped outside last evening. Nature's Great Revival is underway. The maple sap run is over, the salamanders are on the march, and with the first ospreys back in Buzzards Bay, can the herring be far behind? The finches at the feeder are shedding their olive drab for canary yellow, and redwings rasp in the marshlands. Our human neighbors emerge from their dens on about the same schedule as the local black bears, shaking off their winter torpor and reclaiming their sometimes overlapping territories from long disuse.

If the senses of my species were not dulled by progress and evolution, they would quicken with every fresh scent on the warm Spring wind. They would pulse with the first impossible bloom of skunk cabbage, literary melting its way through the frozen earth through the heat of its cellular respiration. They would feel the stirring of the aged and tattered mourning cloak, one of the longest lived butterflies, reemerging in senescence to mate with the impulse of youth. They would thrill with the drone of insects drawn to sticky buds and rank wet earth.

This is the season of quickenings. The word itself derives from the old English "cwic", meaning living or alive, but its modern usage is also appropriate for a season of accelerations. The fetus is said to quicken when its movements can be felt in the womb. The heart quickens with life and vitality. The poetic language of the Nicene Creed proclaims the second coming "in glory to judge the quick and the dead." It is no accident that the Christian celebration of Easter falls at this time, when new life is self-evident.

My birthday is also an early Spring arrival. In these parts, the daffodils will be in bloom a week afterward, and as a young boy I worked out for myself that the last patch of snow would be gone the week before. The first of the spring ephemerals are working their way upward in the bare light below the leafless trees. Dutchman's britches, wild leeks, trout lily and trillium will usher in April's wildflowers, along with the winking yellow eyes of blood root, and clusters of marsh marigolds adding their splash of color to shadowy wetlands.

All these awakenings take place in a brave, bright time when frogs lay eggs in ice-rimmed pools and early birds battle for prime nesting sites. Even as the season advances, a fickle rain can blight the apple's bloom just as surely as longer days call forth its flowers. All around us, nature is striving, seeking, obeying urges as involuntary as breathing. Spring is a serious business, yet still given over to the domain of the heart. "Hang spring cleaning" says the industrious Mole, with a spirit that soars on diaphanous wings. Even a raw wet day like today has a sweet expectancy, like a kite that strains on its tether, ready to take wing.

March 27, 2009

Last night on the way home from a board meeting, I noted that the light rain and temperatures were just within the range required to kick off the first wave of migrating amphibians. By the time I pulled into Canaan I started to see wood frogs by the roadway, so I rousted my children from bed, stuffed pajamas into boots and jackets and rounded up three functional flashlights. We headed over to a bend in Rte 41 near Dutcher’s Bridge where judging by the carnage I have observed there in past years, there is a major migration corridor. There were a few frogs there, nothing spectacular, but once over in Salisbury I saw numerous frogs and heard the first chorus of Spring Peepers coming from a nearby oxbow of the Housatonic.

I checked one of my favorite spots for salamanders on Taconic Rd but saw only a frog or two. However, the big salamander crossings in Sheffield, MA on Rte 41 showed evidence that the yellow spotted salamanders were beginning to move. We escorted a handful across the highway between Sages Ravine and Berkshire School Road, but it was on this latter route, running East / West across Sheffield’s extensive seepage wetlands, that we observed them moving in significant numbers. We found many more living than dead, perhaps 40 in all, which is not as many as we find in really big nights. The temperature was 42 and perhaps more began to move later in the night for I found the thermometer was nearly 50 when I awoke this morning.

March 19, 2009

My biwekly article in the Lakville Journal concerns migrating salamanders and vernal pools, and can be read here with free registration:

...On warm rainy nights in early spring, there are certain roads in our area that are littered with hopping, skittering and — regrettably — squashed amphibians. Volunteers sometimes monitor heavily traveled crossings during the migration and assist the frogs and salamanders on their journey to the opposite side of the road. My children and I look forward to being out one evening very soon when The Big Night arrives, “saving Spotty” and its many relations.

March 06, 2009

Last Sunday, Emily, Elias and I went over to our friend Tom's quarry for an afternoon of skating and wound up doing some ice fishing besides. Emily caught two small bass right off the bat, but unfortunately there was no camera there at the time to record the moment. Elias did not hook anything, but he and I did have some great time waiting by the hole, as this photo will attest.

Those marking the progression of our family through the years will regard these two pictures as having archival significance for 2 additional reasons. Emily has glasses, received just before Christmas, and I have grizzle, clearly showing through at the jaw in my winter beard. The skates, however, remain as always the hand-me-downs from my father, and unlike some years at least they have a fresh, keen edge.

And yes, that is a medieval cowl, Renaissance Faire vintage, and just the thing for warmth and unrestricted movement on the ice. Or skulking in Sherwood. I have a full hooded doublet as well, for more formal occasions.

January 12, 2009

I happened upon an 1885 History of Berkshire County and discovered a passage relating to farming in New Marlboro, but just as applicable elsewhere in the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills during the late 19th century:

"...agriculture just now, especially in the eastern portion of the town, is suffering a strange and painful decline. Many homesteads have been sold for for less than the cost of their buildings, and others, the dwelling, the outbuildings, and most of the fences virtually abandoned, are being used as large pasture tracts. The famous saying that the first settlers feared that they could not find enough stone for building purposes, now when boulders covers o large part of the surface, seems incomprehensible. Perhaps these stones were regarded as unsuitable for building, or more probably they were then covered with vegetable mold and have since been heaved to the surface by frosts which strike deeper than when the earth was protected by forests. Many hundred acres formerly yielding fine crops of hay cannot now be mowed, much less plowed. As a consequence of this, and perhaps also because of the exhaustion of certain elements of the soil, there appeared, about forty years ago, a shrubby growth known as hard hack (Potentilla fruticosa) and steeple top (Spirea tomentosa), the two growing together, and this growth now covers entire farms, destroying even much of the pasture. This is one of the most discouraging features of New Marlboro farming, since to clear the land of boulders and hard hack would cost more than its present, or subsequent value. Much of this land, moreover, would require to be underdrained. nature is providing some compensation in covering much of this land with a growth of pine, which destroys the hard hack and may soon become valuable for timber.

The author of the New Marlboro chapter of the History of Berkshire County, Professor S. T. Frost, is a keen observer who recognizes many of the patterns and processes - both natural and social - that affected the landscape of his day. Some of the rural communities of western New England lost more than half their populations in the decades after the Civil War, as the availability of more fertile western lands and urban migration combined with the collapse of the local iron industry and decline of agriculture in a perfect storm of cultural, economic and ecological disturbance.

The plants he describes as invading the abandoned farmlands are actually native to our region rather than introduced exotics, but behaved invasively in the absence of competition in the wet meadows that were no longer farmed. Potentilla fruticosa, more commonly known today as Shrubby cinquefoil , is a calcium-loving wetland indicator species in the marble valleys of the Housatonic watershed. Steeplebush (Hardhack) usually occurs in wetlands as well. Neither species provides good grazing (even today, deer avoid browsing cinquefoil), so in addition to the factors mentioned for their spread, the use of former cropland as pasture might have encouraged the growth of these species until they out-competed the available forage. Although he would not have though to use this term, Professor Frost is describing the impact of a lack of stewardship on the condition of previously managed lands.

Pasture pines invading abandoned fields became a regular feature of the changing New England landscape. Anytime I find myself walking through a stand of mature white pine and nothing else, I am certain that they grew to maturity as a plantation or in an open field. The forest that reclaimed these previously managed lands is different in species composition and structure, the attributes of its soil and the habitat it provides, than that which had been first cleared for settlement. Some of the bird species that would have been abundant during the height of agriculture in our region - meadowlarks, bobolinks, and a host of other grassland birds - are in parabolic decline as the land reforests. Others like the wild turkey that would have been rare in Professor Frost's day are now thriving and expanding their numbers.

The very next passage in this history anticipates the state of real estate affairs in the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills 125 years later:

"This present unfortunate condition of New Marlboro agriculture must be temporary. When the best portions of the West, now being taken up so rapidly, are occupied, these deserted lands must become valuable, both for their locality and their producing power."

Proximity to major metropolitan centersin New York, and to a lesser degree Hartford, has made our land valuable as residential real estate. A renewed interest in locally-produced food and concern about the loss of our remaining farmland to non-agricultural uses runs up against the hard fact that the land is worth more in a developed state than as farmland, and is too expensive for new farmers to obtain. Meanwhile, Berkshire County is losing population and Connecticut is hemorrhaging an exodus of young people at one of the highest rates in the nation. We have saved many significant lands from development but are unable to maintain them in a condition which will ensure that the very qualities that made them special will persist over time. Without the resources to care for and steward our fields and forests, they are vulnerable to fresh degradation from invasive species and to loss of ecological productivity.

We should expect more changes in this altered landscape, not all of it for the worse. Frost reports that "the fox and the raccoon are the largest game that now survives civilization." Today we share our backyards with bears.

January 08, 2009

I drove along the Housatonic in the piercing cold of the New Year. The steam rising from the river glazed the trees on either bank in glistening sheaths of ice. They call this phenomenon “sea smoke” in the Gulf of Maine, and it arises when water that is cold enough to kill an unprotected swimmer is still warm by comparison to the arctic January air.

The cold streams and rivers of the Berkshires and Litchfield Hills can look like the Valley of 10,000 Smokes. At such times they reveal their kinship both to the urban vapors that rise from sidewalk grates when it’s Christmastime in the city, and to the midsummer wisps that settle in cool fens and seepage wetlands.

The Housatonic certainly seemed to be smoking as I drove past the paper mills on my way north. Not so many years ago, you could tell what color paper they were making by the stain of the water below the discharge from the mill. Massachusetts has some of the most progressive wetlands and river protection laws in the Northeast, but for most of our history we have treated the waters as sewers for the excretions of industry and as convenient dumping grounds for the effluvia of human enterprise...."